People interpret robotic non-linguistic utterances categorically

Abstract

This paper presents an experiment testing whether adults exhibit Categorical Perception when rating non-linguistic utterances, made by a Nao robot, on an affective level. This experiment followed the traditional methodology used in psychology, with some minor alterations. A stimulus continuum was produced and subjects asked to complete a discrimination and a identification task. In the former subjects were asked to rate whether stimulus pairs were affectively different while in the latter they were asked to rate single stimuli affectively using a facial gesture tool. Results present compelling evidence for the presence of Categorical Perception in this particular case.